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Tumblr is dead, long live NewTumbl.
I came across NewTumbl (formally newTumbl) a few days ago, after finding my Tumblr feed just wasnât what it used to be. Itâs not that the dirty pictures are goneâI only ever followed one blog where the images might be considered sensualâbut that the energy was. Those friends whose posts interested me werenât posting much any more, and it wasnât just them: my posting had diminished significantly. Platforms, I imagine, have a shelf life, and when announcements such as Verizonâs last year, which became known, perhaps incorrectly, as Tumblrâs âporn banâ, it was bound to affect the platform. It was the language that opened Verizon up to ridicule: apparently, they had a problem with âfemale-presenting nipplesâ, and some innocent content was flagged for removal.
What Verizon had really underestimated was that among the adult imagery were communities that were having free and safe discussions about sexuality, and sex workers themselves had a place where they, too, could post. It wasnât an âadultâ site per se, considering the overwhelming majority of the content was family-friendly. That perhaps kept the place relatively safe: you could have these private discussions while coming across general posts featuring interesting photography or good political viewpoints. Tumblr also hadnât descended into the political divisiveness that plague platforms such as Twitter.
I liked Tumblr for many reasons. It became a fun place to post interesting graphics for me, and to put anything that I didnât want to structure into long-form thoughts. It was image-based. Every now and then I would put up a quotation. The Font Police blog is still there, with over 20,000 followers.
I liked the fact that for years, someone would get back to you when you posted a query. This was true even after Yahoo acquired it.
But during the Blogcozy experiment, which sadly resulted in that platformâs closure, I cut down my time on Tumblr, because I had found a more suitable place to put those brief thoughts and to share with friends. Had Tumblr been a greater draw, I wouldnât have considered it. After Blogcozy closed, I didnât really resume my Tumblring to the same extent. Social seemed to be dying, since it was being run by Big Tech firms that lied as their main position. Even if Tumblr was more honest (and it was), the age of social media seemed to be at an end.
I may have been wrong, because since posting on NewTumbl Iâve been impressed by the sense of energy there. Yes, it has attracted a great deal of the adult posters who left Tumblr. But if you donât want to see X-rated stuff, you say so in the settings, and adjust to M (for mature), O (for office), or even F (for family). You won’t see anything coarser than what you chose (with the occasional exception when posters did not have a clue how the ratings’ system works). The interface is familiar-but-different-enough for Tumblr users and Verizon lawyers. Yet it goes beyond what Tumblr does, with the smart use of Interstate as the body typeface, and photos in multi-image posts actually appear in the order you load them.
Itâs not perfect: I couldnât link a video but I could upload; and I managed to stumble on a 404 page by following links, both of which Iâll report, since they make it so easy to do.
But hereâs the really good thing: the transparency. One of the main developers, Dean, talks to users and provides feedback. Heâll even post when an error occurs during developmentâthatâs something youâll never see Facebook do when its databases die.
He and I have already exchanged notes via DMs after I joined for two days, and I said I saw so many parallels between what he was doing and what I saw with Tesla when Martin Eberhard was running it (transparency over ego), or even in the days when Jerry and David were building YahooâIâm old enough to have been submitting sites to them while they were still being run out of a garage. Thereâs an exciting sense with Dean and the small NewTumbl crew that theyâre building something useful for the world, celebrating free speech and humanity. Am I being overly optimistic? I donât think I am: I enjoy the UI, I like the openness and honesty, and these are just what the tech sector needs. I see a draw for spending my time here even though I have zero followers to my blog. The buzz feels similar to when I discovered some sites back in the 1990s: it seems new and exciting.
Itâs also rather nice being the first person to populate some fandom hashtags, though I was second for Doctor Who, and for anyone ever searching for The Avengers, they will see, rightly, a photograph of Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee.
Iâll see you there at jackyan.newtumbl.com. Lucire also has a NewTumbl at lucire.newtumbl.com.

This is how big an Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei nerd I am.
Three years ago (April 7, 2016), we were introduced to Daniel Roesner as Paul Renner in âCobra, ĂŒbernehmen Sieâ. There is a flashback scene dated April 7, 1996 when Paul and Semir meet for the first time, with Paul as a child.

There are a few problems with the scene.
If it was April 1996, then it would have been around the events of âTod bei Tempo 100â, and Semir looked quite different:

His goatee only begins appearing in episode 33 (production order), âEin Leopard lĂ€uft Amokâ (October 1, 1998), and the BMW 3er with the registration NE-DR 8231 made its first appearance the episode before, âDie letzte Chanceâ (which was actually shown later, on October 8, 1998).
Also in âCobra, ĂŒbernehmen Sieâ, Semir is on the radio to Andrea, when Andrea was not working for PASt in 1996. She made her first appearance in âRache ist sĂŒĂâ (November 18, 1997).
I can understand star ErdoÄan Atalay being reluctant to shave his goatee for the flashback, but it would have thrilled fans if he called to base for Regina and not Andrea.

RTLAbove: From the first episode after the half-season break, ‘Endstation’. All three men have, at some point, played the sidekick on Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei: ErdoÄan Atalay, who was hired to play second banana in the third episode but has since become the star of the show; Rainer Strecker, the man whom Atalay replaced, here guesting and playing another role altogether; and Daniel Roesner, who is currently Atalay’s co-star in the series, and who also had played another role prior to this one.

One for the Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei fans. Our groupâthe largest on Facebook and, ironically, the one run mostly by non-Germansâsaw this question from Tim Gottschall:

This has always annoyed me. At Action Concept, this is still season 23.
This has been compounded by certain episodes from new seasons being mixed in as the existing season was airing (e.g. production seasons 6 to 12) and episodes being shown out of order.
According to production blocks (with overlaps explained above):

Season 1: episodes aired between March 12 and April 30, 1996 (episodes 1â9)
Season 2: March 11, 1997 to June 4, 1998 (episodes 10â31)
Season 3: October 1, 1998 to May 6, 1999 (episodes 32â47)
Season 4: December 16, 1999 to December 14, 2000 (episodes 48â63)
Season 5: April 5, 2001 to April 11, 2002 (episodes 64â80)
Season 6: April 18, 2002 to April 10, 2003 (episodes 81â97)
Season 7: September 11, 2003 to April 29, 2004 (episodes 98â110)
Season 8: March 25 to November 18, 2004 (episodes 111â25)
Season 9: February 10, 2005 to April 20, 2006 (episodes 126â41)
Season 10: April 27 to November 16, 2006 (episodes 142â57)
Season 11: March 22 to November 1, 2007 (episodes 158â68)
Season 12: September 20, 2007 to April 24, 2008 (episodes 169â79)
Season 13: September 4, 2008 to April 9, 2009 (episodes 180â94)
Season 14: September 3, 2009 to April 22, 2010 (episodes 195â209)
Season 15: September 2, 2010 to April 14, 2011 (episodes 210â22)
Season 16: September 15, 2011 to April 19, 2012 (episodes 223â38)
Season 17: September 6, 2012 to April 18, 2013 (episodes 239â53)
Season 18: October 24, 2013 to May 15, 2014 (episodes 254â67)
Season 19: October 9, 2014 to April 30, 2015 (episodes 268â82)
Season 20: September 10, 2015 to May 26, 2016 (episodes 283â98)
Season 21: September 1, 2016 to May 18, 2017 (episodes 299â317)
Season 22: September 14, 2017 to May 3, 2018 (episodes 318â36)
Season 23: September 13, 2018 to date (episode 337 to date)

However, according to how Cobra 11 aired, all but the (short) first block were shown with a break in betweenâpresumably due to labour laws there that required casts to have a break otherwise they would be overworked. So if you divide each of the seasons above into two, except for the first, then we are up to âseason 43â. This is the numbering the DVDs use. As to âseason 33â, I understand RTL used to follow the production numbering, but eventually diverged from it, so itâs a mixture of the âstudioâ numbering and the âbroken seasonâ numbering.
I realize no one outside the fan community for this show will really care, but as this is my personal and business blog, a wide variety of subjects is covered. And for those fans who may stumble across this, I hope the above helps settle some questions.

Of course YouTube lies. Say youâve paused your search and watch history on YouTube. And you block all youtube.com cookies. YouTube wonât track you, right? Youâve made it quite clear you donât want a record of what youâve done, so YouTube shouldnât keep one.
Wrong.
As with Big Tech, what you expect given what youâve told them, and what they actually do, are two different things.
Thereâs just enough ambiguity in Googleâs terms and conditions for YouTube to get away with this.
Itâs exactly like Facebook, which says you can opt out of certain categories of advertising (e.g. alcohol), then serve you advertising for exactly those categories you object to.
Itâs exactly like Google, which in 2009 said you could opt out of ad customization, then it began tracking you again within 24 hours of that opt-out.
This is part of the same deal, and since US authorities are generally too gutless to go after Big Tech, theyâll keep doing this.
Say you watched, as I did, a video on a toy collector restoring a model.
You donât expect any tracking given all the settings you made earlier on.
YouTube ignores all that and has a way of determining who you are, even without cookies. Google has a series of cookies that it plants, and it can probably get you through those. Or itâs recognizing your IP address.
I may block a lot of Google cookies but even I donât block them all, since one of the schools Iâm involved with is heavily into Googleâs tools.
After writing this I may download another browser just for their stuff and block all google.com cookies. Itâs not as though Google News, the last of their services I used, is particularly useful any more, after they got rid of the customized news home pages.
When I watched a completely unrelated video, there was a link on the side to one of the same YouTube userâs videos.

You then have to clear your watch and search history, even though you donât have a YouTube account, block all YouTube cookies, and you arenât signed in to Google in any way.

You might say that the paused history only works when youâre signed in, and thatâs a fair call. But I donât expect a user who isnât signed in to be snooped on more than someone who is. Maybe Iâm just weird that way, and the default position for Big Tech is to track everyone unless you tell them otherwise (again, their T&Cs probably allow them to get away with this).
Consequently, YouTube says we have a âsigned-out YouTube search historyâ and a âsigned-out YouTube watch historyâ on each device.
While I know you can use a private- or incognito-mode tab, you should be asking yourself: why on earth should I, given how I expect their website to work?
Itâs only after clearing all of that that you get a truer list of recommended videos.
As I have said before, I really still donât get why people want to keep using these unethical firmsâ services. If Google disappeared overnight, itâd take us a week to find replacements.

Like this:

I see British filmmaker Steve McQueen has remade Lynda La Planteâs Widows.
I was younger than he was when it aired, and didnât appreciate the storylines to the same extent, though I have recollections of it.
What I did recall was a Smith and Jones sketch, which had a voiceover along these lines: âFrom the makers of The Sweeney and Minder, Eusless Films presents Widows: exactly the same, but with women in it.â
The reality was that La Plante wrote Widows because she was unimpressed with how men wrote female parts in scripts (she was the actress Lynda Marchal, and I still remember a small role she had in The Professionals). It was actually ground-breaking. Verity Lambert produced.
I hope McQueen does well with his remake, with Viola Davis, and the setting shifted to Chicago.
I worry a bit given that Hollywood also remade Edge of Darkness or State of Play: pretty decent miniseries that werenât as good when transplanted and turned into feature films, according to period reviews.
I saw the former and while it was a pacy actioner, even as far as employing the same New Zealand director, Martin Campbell, it lacked the depth and suspense of the original; I darenât even see the latter as the original remains one of my favourite miniseries and I donât want to see it butchered, even if Scottish director Kevin Macdonald helmed it. It was a wave of American efforts to remake anything with John Simm and Philip Glenister.
But tonight I did think about the other famous Euston Films series that were remade or reimagined.The Sweeney was remade but with the action still in South London. The 2012 version by Nick Love had a tight budget but plenty of violence, perhaps recapturing the grittiness that audiences would have felt when they first saw the Armchair Cinema special of Regan. Ray Winstone, who guested on the original, took the lead, and channelled Jack Regan well; Ben Drew (Plan B) had even more of a coldness and wild tension on screen as George Carter than Dennis Waterman did. Itâs perhaps best known for a car chase involving the crew from Top Gear, who took the opportunity to build a sketch around it during production. It wasnât as special as the original, and I didnât rush to repeat the DVD. Reviewers didnât like it, but in my opinion it ranks above Sweeney!, the first attempt to turn the TV series into a silver screen film but using the original cast. There, we saw countless acts of violence explained away at the end in one meeting with Thaw and Michael Latimerâs characters after a plot that seemed to build up a complex conspiracy. Sweeney 2, by Troy Kennedy Martin (the brother of the creator), was far tenser and the better effort, and it was fun to spot the Ford press fleet vehicles with the VHK prefix on the number plates.

Minder never went to the big screen, but a remake, or sequel, appeared in 2009, with Shane Richie and Lex Shrapnel. I sat through the first, found it tolerable, and at least in the spirit of the original, but it always felt like an imitation trying to live up to its forebear, not something that carved its own direction. Many donât seem to remember that Minder was created as a vehicle for Dennis Waterman, not George Cole, even if more and more scripts wound up focusing on the latterâs Arthur Daley, leading to Waterman quitting the series. The 2009 seriesâ premiĂšre followed on from that later formula, whereas to me it always required the two stars being on par with each other.

So, will the Americanized Widows follow suit? Will it be âexactly the same, but with women in it,â or, with McQueen as talented as he is, will it be a solid retelling with the same sense of ambiguity at the conclusion as the original? I might have to see it because of McQueen and screenwriter Gillian Flynn, and McQueen says he has been a fan of the series since he saw it as a teenager. Even the original Dolly Rawlins (Ann Mitchell) has a cameo.
Now, who’ll star in a new Van der Valk?

âThere’s an old Polish proverb âŠ’ I believe it’s ‘Reality television can’t stop the motorways in Warsaw from getting icy.’

I’ve always known what sort of telly I liked, and often that was at odds with what broadcasters put on. In the 1970s, my tastes weren’t too dissimilar from the general public’s, but as the years went on, they diverged from what New Zealand programmers believed we should watch.
Shows I liked would prematurely disappear (Dempsey & Makepeace), only to return very late at night a decade later. Some only ever appeared late at night (Hustle), then vanish (in New Zealand, seasons 5 to 8 have never appeared on a terrestrial channel, and they have also never been released on DVD).
We had a British expat visitor on Wednesday. He arrived here in 2008, and had no idea that TV1 had once been the home of British programming, and TV2 was where the Hollywood stuff went.
By the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was watching either DVDs or finding a way to get to BBC Iplayer et al, because less and less of what was on offer had any appeal. We had boxed sets of Mission: Impossible, The Persuaders, and others.
When the country switched to Freeview, I couldn’t be bothered getting a decoder. We were fine with online. Eventually, I did buy a TV set with Freeview, but only because the previous one conked out.
On Thursday night, it became very apparent just how bad television had become here.
Every English-language and Te Reo Māori terrestrial channel had unscripted drama, i.e. “reality” shows, or the occasional panel show or real-life event, other than Prime, showing the MacGyver remake.
Who in the 1980s would have predicted that MacGyver would be the only scripted series on air during prime-time here between 7.30 and 8.30 p.m.?
I realize the economics of television have changed, and there’s no such thing as a TVNZ drama department any more.
Shows which might have had the whole country watching would be lucky to pull in a quarter of the audience today.
But it is a sad reflection that the televised equivalent of the weekly gossip rag is what rates. The effort needed to produce quality drama is expensive, and not enough of us support it.
I also imagine scripted Hollywood shows are cheaper than British ones, hence what we see on our screens is Americanâand why some kids these days now speak with American accents. Yet to some New Zealanders, Chinese-language signs on Auckland high streets are a bigger threat to the local culture. Really?
In this household, we vote with our attention spansâand over the last month that has meant DVDs of Banacek and, in true 50 shades of Grade fashion, The Protectors. Sometimes, you feel it’s 1972 in this houseâbut at least the telly was better then.

What a coincidence to come across a letter from composer, arranger, conductor and former TVNZ bandleader Terry Gray, dated May 25, 1991, after I blogged about him on (nearly) the seventh anniversary of his passing. Here it is for others who may be interested in a little slice of Kiwi life. It looks like ITC Garamond Book Narrow here, though the resolution doesn’t make it very clear.

I sincerely hope Iâm wrong when I say that the passing of Kiwi composer, arranger and conductor Terry Gray went unnoticed in our news media.
I only found out last month that Terry died in 2011. As a kid of the 1970s and a teenager of the 1980s, Terryâs music was a big part of my life. Before we got to New Zealand, he had already composed the Chesdale cheese jingle, which Kiwis above a certain age know. He was the bandleader on Top Dance, what New Zealanders used to watch before the localized version of Strictly. Terryâs music appeared on variety shows and live events (e.g. Telequest, Miss New Zealand) through the decade. Country GP, The Fire-Raiser, Peppermint Twist, and Daphne and ChloĂ« were also among Terryâs works. In the late 1980s, Terry released an album, Solitaire, which was one of the first LPs I bought with my own money as a teen. By the turn of the decade, Terry hosted live big band evenings at the Plaza Hotel in Wellington, sponsored by the AM Networkâuntil the AM Network could no longer fund the fun, regular events and the radio network itself, eventually, vanished. Terryâs Mum used to attend in those days, and I must have gone to at least half a dozen. I also picked up a Top Dance cassette at one of the evenings.
I still have a nice letter from Terry somewhere, thanking me for my support, in the days when he lived in the Hutt. I learned that he eventually moved down south, to Dunedin, and died of leukemia on July 8, 2011.
On (nearly) the seventh anniversary of his passing, I want to pay tribute to Terry. Here he is in action in Top Dance, hosted by Lindsay Yeo, in 1982.

Now the PM and her partner, Clarke Gayford, have shown off their daughter to the world (video at the end of this post), it reminded me of my own experiences in the maternity ward many years ago.
Iâm not a parent at the time of writing: Iâm talking about the 1980s when I visited Wellington Womenâs Hospital (as it then was), to wait for my Mum, a postnatal midwife, to finish work.
The 1980s donât seem that long ago to me, and all these memories are still very clear, but when you relay the story, you realize decades have passed.
Mum shifted to WWH in 1980, when it first opened, and I still recall having a preview tour of the building before it opened. New carpets, new fixtures. Hand-held buzzers hooked up to the wall where you could call for a nurseâhow modern! The 1980s had well and truly arrived, and how lucky of those patients, because this place was like a hotel. We really did think it was that flash in 1980.
And it was a nice place to visit. I finished school at St Markâs at 2.45 p.m. and the bus would usually get to the hospital by around 3 p.m. There was a long walk to the building at the back, taking an internal route, and walking through a basement tunnel with painted stripesâit felt like a science-fiction movie. Iâd get to Ward 15 and I was expected to wait in the TV room.
The TV room was next to the âday roomâ, which really meant the smoking room, where new Mums could pop in and have a fag. Every now and then, youâd get a naughty new mother whoâd take an ashtray into the TV room, where Iâd be waiting, but we are talking the early 1980s, and the term secondhand smoke had not entered the vernacular.
Of course, we youngsters werenât allowed to change the channel if adults were watching. Unfortunately, in the days of two state-run channels, most new mothers would watch Prisoner, and I donât mean The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan. I meant the Australian soap opera Prisoner, set in a womenâs prison, and known to British readers as Prisoner: Cell Block H. I could never comprehend why anyone would watch the sheer misery of the storylines about a womenâs prison, but I suppose in the early 1980s, these ladies were thinking: âNo matter how tough things are for me, at least Iâm not in Wentworth.â I would wait patiently for 3.30 p.m. to tick by, and Lynne Hamilton singing âOn the Insideâ (itself a depressing, haunting theme tune) and the Grundy logo were signs that relief was coming. However, to this day, I still know this blasted song, and can play it by ear on a piano. Without checking online:

On the inside the roses grow,
They donât mind the stony ground.
But the roses there are prisoners, too,
When morning comes around.

Only once do I remember a Mum offering me control of the TV during the Prisoner hour to watch whatever channel I wanted, and of course, that meant the childrenâs programming, eventually an after-school show imaginatively titled After School, hosted by a cheerful Te Reo-speaking man called Olly Ohlson.
Mum would be another 15 to 30 minutes, so my time in front of the telly was fairly limited. Weâd walk home to Newtown in those days, and my memory of that journey home was that it was often sunny. Of course, that couldnât have been the case, as I have equally strong memories of below-zero temperatures on the radio in the morning in 1981, and very grey weather watching Springbok tour marches (including fights between protesters and police officers) outside my window growing up. Those may or may not be the subject of another blog entry, as Iâm not traditionally one to post childhood reminiscences on this blog.